Letter from the Editor-in-Chief Rob Kling
15(4) 1999

This special issue of The Information Society, 15(4), devoted to "Identity,
Voice, and Community Formation via the Internet" developed through a serendipitous
grouping of articles in our publication queue. In contrast, most of our special
issues, such as the forthcoming issue on Universal Service, develop through a
more orderly planned process of selecting a guest editor, as well as developing
and circulating a special call for papers. TIS has been publishing one or two
special issues a year, since 1996. You can learn more about forthcoming Special
Issues, as well as ways to propose them, on our web site (http://www.slis.indiana.edu/TIS).

This issue opens with Hans Klein’s “Tocqueville in Cyberspace” – a theoretical
and empirical investigation of the ways that computer networks could
strengthen democracy by energizing citizen associations. Alexis de Tocqueville
credited the vitality of American democracy in the early 19th century
to Americans’ reliance on an array of civic associations that he noted
were relatively rare in European aristocratic societies. It is commonplace
to claim that on-line forums reduce the costs of meeting because they can
eliminate travel and enhance some kinds of convenience. It is a more open
and complex question about how to build consensus and commitment for political
action in on-line forums. In short, they may be viable for groups where
people know each other and have established trust outside their electronic
meetings; and they be viable for short-run conviviality, such as in chat
rooms. Their value for formulating policy and strategy and mobilizing commitment
in civic associations is not a given. Klein examines a Boston-based citizen
association, the Telecommunication Policy Roundtable -- Northeast (TPR-NE).
He reports how TPR-NE’s uses of the Internet suggest that on-line
forums may allow associations to be more responsive, more robust, and able
to unite more members.

There has been a continuing debate about the extent to which participation
in on-line forums democratizes meetings (when compared with face-to-face
meetings). Some analysts have argued that the ways that on-line meetings
tend to mask age, status signs, and gender tend to democratize participation
in electronic forums. Two articles in our last issue reported cases
where female-presenting participants in on-line discussions were treated
very aggressively by male-presenting participants. Some women may prefer
to use pseudonyms to mask their gender, if they expect to be harshly
treated in on-line communications. How effectively can pseudonyms mask
gendered styles of communication?

In our second article, “Gender Identification, Interdependence, and
Pseudonyms in Computer-Mediated Communication,” Michael Jaffe, Young-Eum
Lee, Li-Ning Huang, and Hayg Oshagan examine this question with a set of
experiments. In one electronic forum, the participants were identified
by their real names while participants in the other were identified by
self-chosen pseudonyms. Analyses of conference transcripts and pseudonym
choices indicated that i) women tended to mask their gender with their
pseudonym choice while males did not, and ii) women in both forums generally
tended to exhibit certain dimensions of social interdependence more frequently
than men. These dimensions included references to others, references
to self, and supporting statements. The participants use of pseudonyms,
even those that were gender neutral, did not effectively mask all of these
important gendered features of communication.

Mark Poster’s “Identity, Nations and Global Networking” inaugurates a new kind
section for TIS – Perspectives. Articles in the Perspectives section
are synthetic and tightly argued, but they may also reflect a refined and disciplined
speculative imagination. They may also be as long as regular articles, in contrast
with the shorter Forum articles. Poster notes that while the Internet began
as an instrument of U.S. military strategy it is now beyond the control of any
nation state. People can use it in ways that ignore national borders and
national governments struggle to control flows of information as if they were
in their physical jurisdictions. Poster argues that the Internet is becoming
a para-national culture that combines global connectivity with local specificity,
a “glocal” phenomenon that seems to resist national political agendas and to
befuddle national political leaderships. His essay goes on to examine several
ways that both actual behavior on the Internet undermine the sovereignty of
nation states, and how and media depictions amplify anxieties of such loss.

Poster is careful to avoid a stance that contrasts national and global
in a rigid binary opposition. As a historian, he notes that the nation
state was enmeshed international relations from its inception; its sovereignty
was never perfect, always relative to laws and obligations forged through transnational
mechanisms. And, the nation state has changed over time: the 19th century nation
state was very different from the early 21st century nation state which may
be subject to an immense array of international treaties and controls
over trade, the conduct of war, the use of communications frequencies,
and international transportation standards. He concludes by noting several different
ways that nation states may develop.

The next three articles appear in our Forum section. In “Face to Face
and Computer-Mediated Communities” Amitai Etzioni and Oren Etzioni . examines
whether virtual communities be “real,” and manifest important qualities, such
as caring and social commitment, that characterize f2f communities? They compare
face?to?face (f2f) and computer?mediated communications (CMC) from the viewpoint
of their respective abilities to form and sustain communities. They also identify
a third kind of infrastructure for community that is based on a combination
of face-to-face (f2f) and CMC (or off- and on-line) communications.

In “Web Security and Privacy” Jean Camp examines how people who browse
the Web protect their privacy, based on the U.S. legal tradition. While
web browsing can serve many purposes, including informal leisure communication
and shopping, it also plays an increasing role in political communication
and the routine functioning of important social institutions, such as health
support groups, policing, and grass roots political organizations.
Issue 15(2) of TIS, which was devoted to “Anonymous Communication on the
Internet,” included some articles that showed how open communication
depended at times upon anonymity. This article is a short tutorial that
defines some key terms, and explains what information is transferred during
Web browsing. Camp describes some of the available technology
for privacy protection, including public and private key cryptography and
Web proxies. She closes by showing that although privacy in Web browsing
has no current legal protection in the United States, the right to privacy
in the analog equivalents has been recognized in the American legal tradition.

In “Information Warfare,” Blaise Cronin and Holly Crawford examine
how social relationships and community may be undermined through information
warfare. They argue that the term, information warfare, has remained the
preserve of the defense community. The prevailing language, images and
metaphors are classically militaristic in character. But they show
how many of the underpinning principles and assumptions have application
well beyond conventional military contexts. In particular, the principles
and practices of information warfare are being exhibited, more or less
wittingly, in a variety of civilian contexts (from computer-based fraud
to cyber-stalking) and there are good grounds to assume that this trend
will intensify causing potentially serious social problems and creating
novel challenges for the criminal justice system.

This issue ends with a Review Essay of Pierre Lévy ‘s book, The
Virtual Game, by Ronald Day. Two of Lévy’s books have recently appeared
in English translation. Day paper critically examines the Levy’s development
of the game as a model for identity, community, and the meaning and function
of objects. The game metaphor is commonplace in discussions of cultural modernity,
especially in the areas of business, the military, sports, and, of course today,
in digital software and network design.